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  <title>MediaGoblin 0.2.1: Gearing Up</title>
  <meta name="date" content="2012-02-09 10:00" />
  <meta name="author" content="Deb Nicholson" />
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  <img src="/blog_images/mediagoblin_0.2.1_banner.png"
       alt="MediaGoblin 0.2.1: Gearing Up banner" />
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<p>Welcome to MediaGoblin 0.2.1: Gearing Up!  This release has largely
been about paving the way forward for MediaGoblin's future and
restructuring under the hood.  Nonetheless, a good number of awesome
features got implemented for this release.</p>

<p>We've brought some old-school awesomeness with ASCII art support to
go along with our video support (which you may remember we were pretty
jazzed about adding
<a href="http://mediagoblin.org/news/mediagoblin-0.2.0-our-tubes.html">in
our last release</a>).  You have to specifically enable it, so see
<a href="http://docs.mediagoblin.org/media-types.html#ascii-art">this
documentation for details</a>.  In the future, you can expect to see
support for all sorts of media types, including 3d models, slides, and
presentations!</p>

<p class="blog_image">
  <a href="/blog_images/mediagoblin_0.2.1_ascii_art.png"
     ><img src="/blog_images/mediagoblin_0.2.1_ascii_art-scaled.png"
           alt="ASCII art example: Happy GNU Year!" /></a>
</p>

<p>There are plenty of nice UI tweaks, including nice, tidy-looking
comment areas.  You can now easily
apply <a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/">Creative Commons
licenses</a> to your MediaGoblin media.</p>

<p class="blog_image">
  <a href="/blog_images/mediagoblin_0.2.1_cc_licensing.png"
     ><img src="/blog_images/mediagoblin_0.2.1_cc_licensing-scaled.png"
           alt="CC Licensing Support (demoed with 'BBB Loves CC' video)" /></a>
</p>

<p>We're now able to provide a customizable EXIF metadata
display. <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EXIF">EXIF data</a>
means all the little tags that modern media recording devices include
inside your image files. If your camera records it, you can display
it: location, camera manufacturer, what the camera model was, the
focal length, etc. If you took a sideways picture (and your camera is
fancy enough to detect it) then MediaGoblin will rotate your image in
the right direction for you. The default setting is hidden (but not
scraped) metadata. Since this is MediaGoblin, it's easily customized
for your instance -- just turn on exif_visible option in
mediagoblin.ini.</p>

<p>GPS support is working! Does your camera have a GPS in it? Then you
can haz maps. We worked hard to build compatibility with another great
FLOSS project, <a href="http://www.openstreetmap.org">OpenStreetMap</a>.
Again, this feature is off by default. You can enable option
geolocation_map_visible in your mediagoblin.ini to show GPS info.</p>

<p class="blog_image">
  <a href="/blog_images/mediagoblin_0.2.1_openstreetmap_support.png"
     ><img src="/blog_images/mediagoblin_0.2.1_openstreetmap_support-scaled.png"
           alt="MediaGoblin & OpenStreetMap/GPS support" /></a>
</p>

<p>What about "under the hood" news? If MediaGoblin were a car we were
building from scratch, then we recently decided to replace the
engine. After significant discussion, we decided to switch from
MongoDB to SQL using the python
<a href="http://www.sqlalchemy.org/">SQLAlchemy</a>
library. The SQL code is actually already very close to full
deployment in the main repository and many parts have already
performed well in tests. Huge props are due to Elrond who has made
herculean efforts towards the Great Database Migration of 2012.  The
transition is already well on its way!</p>

<p>We're smoothing the way for federation. We're kicking off Kuneco
(which means "togetherness" in Esperanto) is the collection of
libraries we're building so that OStatus, the software that drives our
inspiring forebears at
<a href="http://status.net">StatusNet</a>/<a href="http://identi.ca">identi.ca</a>,
will play nicely with python webapps. We also
implemented <a href="http://pubsubhubbub.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/pubsubhubbub-core-0.3.html">PubSubHubbub</a>
(push) support in this release. We can now "push" notifications of our
feeds out to the PubSubHubbub servers. One small step towards
federation, in a series of many steps that will one day add up to a
large step.  More on this soon!</p>

<p>MediaGoblin is coming soon to a device near you!  We want your
phones, desktop applications and tablets to be able to submit
media.  We're putting together an API that will allow programmers to
hook their applications into MediaGoblin.  One day we'll be part of a
massive decentralized ether and having a great API for
interoperability is one way we start to get there.</p>

<p>So much amazing work happened to make this release possible! We
could not have done without all of our amazing people. People worked
over the holidays. Their paid jobs said, "Hey take a break this
month." and our contributors took that time off and gifted it to the
0.2.1 release.  Thanks so much to: Aleksej Serdjukov, Aaron
Williamson, Christopher Allan Webber, Deb Nicholson, Elrond of Samba
TNG, Jef van Schendel, Joar Wandborg, Karen Rustad, Michele Azzolari,
Will Kahn-Greene! (If we missed you,
<a href="/pages/join.html">let us know</a> so we can correct the
post!)</p>

<p>Get on board! MediaGoblin is actively seeking testers, translators,
coders, and bug filers. We'll
<a href="http://mediagoblin.org/pages/join.html">save
you a seat</a> as we set out on on the road to federation!</p>
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